Victor was an enemy to the exclusive taste in philosophy quite as much
as in poetry. On all systems--even of the heretics of Epiphanius and of
Walch--the form of truth is imprinted, as the human form is in the
bestial kingdom, although in bolder and bolder lines. No man can
believe in nonsense proper, although he may speak it. Singular it is,
that precisely the _consequent_ or consistent systems, without the
atomic _Clinamen_[132] of feeling, deviate from each other the most
widely. Systems, like the passions, only at the focal distance throw
the brightest point of light upon the object;--how pitifully, e. g.,
does the great theory of self-subjugation run out of _Christianity_
over into _Stoicism_,--then into _Mysticism_,--then into _Monachism_,
till the stream spreads out and oozes away into _Fohism_, as the Rhine
loses itself in the sand!--The theory of Kant, with all logical
systems, has this tendency to run into sand, and has that
deflection[133] of feeling in common with the inconsequent ones, which
brings together the wasting arms again to a renewing fountain-head. The
two hands of the Pure Reason, which in the antinomy[134] scratched and
beat each other, the Practical Reason peacefully joins together, and
presses them, folded, to the heart, and says, here is a God, a
Conscious Person, and an Immortality!----
Victor first fructified his soul with great Nature or with poets, and
then, and not till then, awaited the dawn of a system. He discovered
(not invented) the truth by soaring and surveying, not by penetration,
microscopic inspection, and syllogistic groping from one syllable of
the book of nature to another, _whereby one gets its words indeed, but
not their sense_. That creeping and touching belongs, he said, not to
the _finding_, but to the _proving_ and confirming of truth; for which
he always took lessons of Bayle: for no one is a poorer teacher in the
discovery of truth, or a better one for the proof of it, than acuteness
or Bayle, who is its mint-assayer, but not its miner.
* * * * *